Jon Hare, the man responsible for Sensible Soccer and the Sensible Software range, says that the "quality of programming has gone down" in the present world of big corporation developers and publishers that differs massively to gaming's earlier years.
He points towards us Brits having a different sense of humour as a key cause for the decline in influence UK studios have nowadays.
"Something that is not often talked about is just how Americanised the industry became when the big media companies came in," he said.
"The American approach is seen as good business, but in a lot of cases the American side of things just don't understand our humour.
"Even if you look at Grand Theft Auto which is probably the most successful British developed product in recent times it's still very Americanised," explained Hare.
And it's the expansion into big business and safe sequels that Hare finds difficult, he explains. "What's been hard for me as a designer and team leader is how difficult it is to get people to trust you. Not just publishers either, but often people within your own team," admits Hare.
"I honestly believe that the quality of programming has gone down. People like [Sensible stalwarts] Chris Yates, Chris Chapman and Julian Jameson - they virtually did the big games on their own," recalls Hare, reminiscing of the age when the comparatively basic games were made by small teams of people.
You couldn't possibly have ten-man teams working on games of today's complexity, but that's part of the problem, Hare says. "It was a different environment back then because the hardware was more stable. You didn't need loads of people running the graphics, programs just ran at 60 frames per second - so the onus was on the creative and not about fighting with the display.
"You had a smaller team and that meant you started to get some of the subtle little things done that made such a difference to the final game."
WiiWare and Xbox Live, he concludes, are "the best chance we have of seeing new and original games coming out," in his interview with MSN Tech & Gadgets.
He makes it seems all a bit grim, but before you go and do something you'll regret, replenish your excitement by watching sweet videos of one British-developed, new and highly original game we all should be looking forward to.
Programmers need to focus on building better, more flexible & more user-friendly development tools. Hardware developers should get in on it too - mouse & keyboard isn't really ideal for painting/modelling.
The complexity of games is only going in one direction - that's an unchangeable fact. So to adapt, you either get in thousands of slaves to pull the building bricks into place with ropes, or you get a handful of guys operating big f**k off cranes that get the job done in a fraction of the time. I know which one makes more sense.
He's pretty much spot on, especially with the British humor part. Rare used to king of that area and now you look at them and all their recent games, bar the Conker remake, are all lacking in that regard. Just look at how they turned Perfect Dark into an american style game. Thankfully we still have Lionhead keeping the British humor in but then you have the americans complaing about the "annoying" accents etc...
He's pretty much spot on, especially with the British humor part. Rare used to king of that area and now you look at them and all their recent games, bar the Conker remake, are all lacking in that regard. Just look at how they turned Perfect Dark into an american style game.
Could be that only the blokes who later left to form Free Radical were the only funny ones? I mean a lot of the humour in Timesplitters 2 and Second Sight is very British. Unfourtanately TS3 was a bit Americanised as well...
I disagree that you can't find well-developed games done by small teams. You're not going to see that any more with gigantic budget AAA games, but you do still see it at the lower end, especially on PC. Take Aquaria for example. It's a fantastic blending of Ecco and Metroid, and it was developed by two guys. Also look at Portal, the team that developed it wasn't very big but it's had a huge impact since its release.
The reason that you're getting Americanised A-level games is because the US is the largest games market, and because that's often where the investment money to develop those titles. I also feel like he's dismissing the fact that there are still a lot of high-profile games coming out of Japan as well.
These days an American voice-over in a game puts me right off, it's like they don't care that we're not American or something. COD4 was mostly Brits, which surprissed me, but the Multi-player still used Yank military ranks, which sucked.
Dirt was ruined by that bloody naff voice-over, every race you win(which wasn't hard to do) was followed by this s**tty yank voice telling you how wonderfull and fantastic and sexy(I made the last one up) you are. Felt like he was coming on to you, very creepy.
Yep it's all gone lazy, programmers used to squeeze 16 bit games on inferior 8 bit machines. These days we get complaints and excuses and just accept we have to upgrade.
I was just speaking to my friend the other day about the hereos in all the games being American. I mean there are more countries out there to source heroes from you know.
I was just speaking to my friend the other day about the hereos in all the games being American. I mean there are more countries out there to source heroes from you know.
Niko Bellic is Russian so theres 1 non-American hero we can look forward to but whether you can call the main character in a GTA game a "hero" is another matter
I was just speaking to my friend the other day about the hereos in all the games being American. I mean there are more countries out there to source heroes from you know.
Niko Bellic is Russian so theres 1 non-American hero we can look forward to but whether you can call the main character in a GTA game a "hero" is another matter
OK change hero to Star The star of the game. I can only thing of a few that aren't American which is pretty bad considering the amount of titles out there. Sonic is from Mobious (I think I forget the precise history) but even he has a US accent. Give him a tropical accent I say to go with the lush first level from the MD days
I was just speaking to my friend the other day about the hereos in all the games being American. I mean there are more countries out there to source heroes from you know.
Niko Bellic is Russian so theres 1 non-American hero we can look forward to but whether you can call the main character in a GTA game a "hero" is another matter
OK change hero to Star The star of the game. I can only thing of a few that aren't American which is pretty bad considering the amount of titles out there. Sonic is from Mobious (I think I forget the precise history) but even he has a US accent. Give him a tropical accent I say to go with the lush first level from the MD days
The caribbean's fairly lush so why not give sonic a West Indian accent that would be quality What do you think?
Aside from megalomaniac evil geniuses bent on global terror.. yeah, everyone loves Bond.
Well obviously even though I think deep down even the megalomaniacs love him, but they couldn't admit that because they'd lose face I for one as an English man must admit that I love America (mainly because I love scrubs)
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I mean a lot of the humour in Timesplitters 2 and Second Sight is very British. Unfourtanately TS3 was a bit Americanised as well...
I would put family guy a close second though 
